


Ice is Thin

by wesleysgirl



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Angel Book of Days Challenge, Episode: s05e06 Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-08-03
Updated: 2003-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-31 14:51:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wesleysgirl/pseuds/wesleysgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wesley visits the Hyperion, but he's not sure why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ice is Thin

_"Your angels speak with jilted tongues;  
the serpent's tale has come undone,  
you have no strength to squander_  
\- Sarah McLachlan, "Ice"

> >  

The Hyperion was dark and cold. Wesley had spent as much time in the hotel as anywhere else in L.A. save his flat since he'd come here from Sunnydale, and he couldn't remember a time when it had felt so... empty. So utterly devoid of life.

As a comparison for how he himself was feeling, it did rather nicely.

He shut the door behind him and stepped to the edge of the staircase, but didn't start down. Just stood there, breathing in the slightly stale air and feeling, or at least imagining he felt, the dust gradually settling down over everything like a kind of death shroud.

For a place that had held so much life, the Hyperion seemed more funereal than abandoned. It was oddly disturbing although not, Wesley had to admit to himself, surprising. Nothing ironic surprised him anymore, so the fact that the Titan Hyperion of Greek mythology had fathered three children of light was somehow fitting.

After another moment of standing there, he went slowly down the stairs into the lobby, and then back into the office -- what had been, at various points, Angel's office, and his own. Being there was rather like having stepped back in time, or like walking through a doorway into an antique shop filled with relics that held the vibrations of previous owners, layers upon layers of the past one on top of the other.

Wesley thought about going over and sitting behind the desk, just to see how it felt, but instead he went to the mostly emptied bookshelves and looked at the volumes still there. Some upright, others on their sides, all of them coated with dust and smelling faintly of... whatever it is old books smell of. He would have called it mildew, but L.A. was a dry city, rain far from a common occurrence here. It was odd that old neglected books all seemed to give off the same scent, whether they'd grown unwanted in England or California.

It wasn't important. These books had been abandoned because they weren't needed -- Angel clearly didn't see a reason to take them with him to Wolfram and Hart when the resources at their new offices were a thousand times what they'd had when the hotel was their base of operations. Wesley had taken most of the ones that belonged to him back to his own flat, saving them for... he wasn't certain why he'd felt the need to save them, actually.

Perhaps simply because they were his, and there were times when it seemed he had so little.

For that matter, he couldn't quite remember having taken them. There was a vague recollection of walking through the door of his flat and kicking the door closed behind him, a box in his arms. But Wesley wasn't sure that had been books -- had the box been heavy enough? And surely it couldn't have been all of them, although a fair number of his own volumes had been at the flat all along.

It was a mystery, really. And if there was one thing Wesley Wyndam-Pryce was good at, it was solving mysteries. Translating nearly-forgotten languages, breaking codes based on the biological makeup of demons that most people would never have known existed. He had been, might still be at heart, a Watcher -- and that was appropriate in this place as well. Hyperion had, after all, been the Titan God of watching and observation.

Slowly, thoughtfully, Wesley went upstairs to the first floor. It was as familiar to him as any other place in L.A., this hotel, and yet it felt wrong for him to be there. Not because anyone would mind -- although he hadn't said anything about it -- but because they'd moved on, left this behind. One wasn't supposed to go back. In fact, wasn't there some saying about not being able to go back?

Pausing outside the door to Angel's suite with one hand resting gently on the wooden door frame, Wesley puzzled over why he was able to recall some facts that were arguably unimportant while others just slipped away into the ether. Another mystery, and one he didn't expect to solve.

Unlike the current problem -- the reason he'd ended up here. For a few days now, Wesley had been having... well, he wasn't sure what to call them. Flashbacks, maybe, although they weren't flashbacks to anything he could actually recall, and that disturbed him. It seemed to have started just after the defeat of Tezcatcatl, when a seemingly offhand comment of Angel's hand caused the tiniest spark to flitter through Wesley, like a near miss with an electrical current.

Wesley walked further into the room, letting the atmosphere sink in. Something about it was oppressive -- not the heat, as it was actually rather cold. Maybe it was the darkness. Maybe once they'd left, an aura had settled back over the hotel, letting the fear and prejudice that had fed a Thesulac demon for fifty years inch its way back in, establish a presence.

"Wes?"

Wesley spun around to face the doorway, one hand pressed over his heart when he realized who it was. "Angel. What -- what are you doing here?" A smile came to his lips unbidden, his heart lightening as it always did when he saw the vampire.

"I was gonna ask you the same thing." Angel's hands were stuck into his pockets, but he pulled one out so that he could make a vague sort of gesture. "So?"

"So, what?" Wesley asked, puzzled.

"So what are you doing here?" There was something in Angel's voice that Wesley wasn't sure he liked, something... just vaguely accusatory, suspicious perhaps, when of course there shouldn't have been any reason why Angel would be upset about him being there.

Still, he made a valiant effort to put it into words. "There was... I was trying to..." Wesley sighed. "I don't know," he admitted.

"You just suddenly got the urge to come back here?"

He shrugged slightly. "I suppose." A piece of paranoia fell into place like it belonged there, a warning. "How did you know I was here?"

Angel had the decency to look sheepish. "Remember when Wolfram and Hart had all those cameras and stuff here, that whole surveillance thing?"

"Yes, when Holtz was after Darla," Wesley said, as realization swept over him. "Don't tell me you actually..."

"Some of the wiring was still in place," Angel said, holding his hands out at his sides as if to declare his innocence. "Seemed stupid not to take advantage of it. I mean, this place has a history. I didn't want a bunch of kids breaking in and messing it up or anything."

"There are cameras?"

Angel shook his head. "No, just audio." The vampire moved a little bit further into the room, looking down at his feet as if he was uncomfortable in a way that he hadn't been with Wesley, at least not in private, for some time. "Come on, let's get out of here."

There was something in the way Angel said it -- just the tiniest bit too eagerly, setting off another of those sparks of discomfort skittering through Wesley -- that made him take a step back. "No, you go ahead. I'm just going to..."

"To what? There's nothing here, Wesley."

Wesley didn't think that was entirely true. The Hyperion held all sorts of things -- not just physical items like furniture and walls and plumbing, but insubstantial things as well. History, memories... the past. Realizing that Angel was standing there, waiting for him to respond, he rubbed the back of his neck. "Do you remember what you said to me the other day? In your office?"

Something passed behind Angel's eyes, a dark wary shadow that wasn't entirely unfamiliar for some reason Wesley couldn't understand. The vampire lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. "No? I mean -- geez, Wes, how many things do I say to you in a day?"

Hundreds -- perhaps more. But that wasn't the point. Wesley was almost certain that Angel was lying -- that he knew what Wesley was referring to but, for some reason, was choosing to stretch the conversation out. They'd had enough intimate discussions for Wesley to be able to tell when one was being avoided. "About prophecies. Something about 'The father will kill the son?'" The sentence might have meant nothing to Wesley at the time, but that didn't mean he'd forgotten it.

Angel moved closer, bringing the darkness with him.

... _There was a flicker like memory again, of Angel looming over Wesley with something in his hands, of a sensation of fighting for oxygen that wasn't available_...

Gasping, the moment of clarity there and gone again so quickly that Wesley barely understood what had happened, he stepped back, reaching out for a wall that was too far away to do him a bit of good. "Something..." he said, but was unable to complete the sentence.

"Wes?" Uncertain now, Angel came over and touched him, one arm going around Wesley's waist supportively. Wesley let him. "What's going on?"

"I think you know," Wesley said, hearing his own voice as though someone else were speaking. "I think you know what's happening here."

"I think you're coming down with something." Angel guided him over to the bed and pushed him to sit, and again, Wesley didn't fight it. His mind was too full of confusion to worry about what his body was doing. Angel's cool hand touched his forehead lightly. "You feel warm."

"I'd imagine I _always_ feel warm to you," Wesley said irritably, moving away from the touch. "I'm ninety eight point six degrees, and you're room temperature, which I'd estimate at a bit less than seventy. Of course I feel warm."

Angel was crouched in front of him, and now that he'd pulled his hand back had his elbows resting on his thighs, with both hands dangling from the wrist in a way that, under different circumstances, Wesley would have found irresistibly sexy. The thought amused him, and Angel responded to his expression with a tentative smile of his own. "Maybe you should take the rest of the day off. You know, get some rest."

"I don't need rest," Wesley said, although he wasn't sure that was precisely true. "I need to figure out what's happening. When you said that -- in your office -- it... set something off. Sparked something. And I don't know..." He sighed in frustration, unused to struggling with words. Unused to having to put this sensation into words, this feeling of something in his brain unravelling, spiraling out of control to a place where he could only catch glimpses of what could be so many things. Another reality?

Standing up, Angel frowned. "It sounds to me like you've been working too hard."

"I haven't been working hard _enough_ ," Wesley said. "I've been too distracted to focus." All he'd been able to concentrate on was keeping careful track of the flashes, which seemed to be coming more and more frequently.

"Well see? Being all distracted means you've haven't been getting enough sleep. Or something. So why don't you -- "

"I don't need _sleep_ ," Wesley snarled, getting up and stalking over toward the window, looking out through the somewhat grimy surface. "I need to know what the bloody hell is going on!"

Another flashback, this one sharper, clearer than any of the previous ones had been.

... _Standing in a room very like this one, with a knife in his hand, dipping his fingers into a bowl full of blood and then cutting across someone's thin chest, but shallowly. Not to kill, but to... his hand smearing the blood into the cut, then his eyes raising to look into the face of the struggling person in front of him_...

Wesley realized that he was gripping onto the windowsill, holding on tightly, and that Angel was behind him, both hands on his waist. "I'm fine," Wesley said. "I -- "

But there was another flashback, coming immediately on the heels of the one before. This one was more like a slideshow than a film, and it felt as though his brain were exploding, or perhaps imploding, a wave of sharp painful confusion

... _The realization that the boy in front of him had known all along -- the expression on the young man -- *Connor's* face -- and then, like being shot in the gut, a sensation that Wesley was well familiar with, came the expression on Angel's face as the vampire's world shattered into a thousand jagged pieces, leaving behind nothing but a grim sort of determination_...

"You left him," Wesley said wonderingly. He let go of the windowsill in a brief experiment, but his knees wobbled and he ended up sinking through Angel's hands and down onto the carpet. "I suppose that made it easier to leave us as well, when it was necessary." He felt strangely detached physically, even as his mind raced.

Everything was there, all of it just... back, as if it had never disappeared. Clear, often painful memories -- Darla turning up pregnant, when for months now Wesley had believed she'd come to L.A. in an attempt to get Holtz off of her trail and onto Angel's. Connor's birth. The way the back of the baby's neck had smelled faintly of shampoo. Finding that damned prophecy, and how very hard he'd tried to discount it, to find a way out. Taking Connor, Justine's attack, Angel's attempt to kill him, the unbelievable news of the boy's return... all of it.

He looked up at Angel, wanting some sort of explanation, something that could wipe out the low burning rage in his chest even as he tried to filter through the memories.

"Sometimes stuff is," Angel said, then had to add, "Necessary."

"What did you do to him?" Connor was obviously somewhere other than here, unless Angel had him stashed somewhere, and that seemed unlikely. "Was there... was there some sort of accident?"

"What? No!" Angel looked furious, and Wesley remembered what that expression boded. "You think I'd do something to my own _son_?"

_You did something to your friends,_ Wesley thought, but he had better sense than to say it out loud. "I don't know what you'd do," he said. "I don't know what you _did_. Tell me."

Angel was clearly confused and upset, but he reached out a hand to Wesley, offering to help him up. Wesley couldn't bring himself to take it. "I took everything away," Angel said, his hand dropping down beside him again. "His past... me. Made it so that he could start over with a clean slate. So he'd, you know... have a chance."

"Where is he?" Wesley's voice was unexpectedly hoarse, and he struggled to get up on his own, barely managing it.

His face closing off, Angel shook his head slightly. "That's not important. He's happy -- that's all that matters."

"I find it difficult to believe that you're stupid enough to think that's true," Wesley said coldly. "And this... was all of this a lie as well?" He didn't want to think about how much the possibility hurt.

"This?"

"As I'm relatively sure _I'm_ the only one in this room who's had his memory tampered with, this show of ignorance isn't helping your position," Wesley snapped. "I'm referring to our relationship. And I'd hope I wouldn't have to tell you that I'd prefer an honest answer."

Angel seemed reluctant to give one, honest or not. "You and me... that wasn't a lie, Wes." He reached out for Wesley's hand again, and Wesley pulled back before he could take it. "It was real."

"Emphasis on the past tense," Wesley said, what might have been sorrow evident in his voice no matter how he tried to hide it. "If you think I can forgive and forget that easily, you're mistaken. But oh, wait, you haven't actually apologized, have you." Not that there wasn't a nagging feeling about the fact that he himself had never apologized for taking Connor -- despite his intentions, that had been a decision that had resulted in everything around them falling apart. It had led him to Lilah -- or she to him -- and taken his friends away from him, not that any of them remembered that as far as he could tell. "How did you do it?"

Rubbing his forehead, Angel glanced from the floor up to Wesley's face and then back down again. "Senior Partners," he said. "It was part of the deal. We signed on, they gave Connor a fresh start. None of you remembering him, that was just to make everything easier. To protect him."

"Because you didn't trust us." Wesley felt somewhat ill.

"Because I _owed_ him." Angel's voice was raised for the first time, and he started pacing restlessly, releasing pent up energy that must have been building for months. "He deserved better."

"Better than you, you mean," Wesley said, his own anger easing somewhat in the face of Angel's emotion. More gently, he asked, "Where is he?"

"With a family. People who can take care of him." Angel looked utterly miserable, as if he was barely holding on, and Wesley wondered if it was some side effect of whatever had been done to him that he hadn't quite seen the magnitude of it until now.

Wesley found himself moving closer, almost instinctively wanting to offer comfort. It was very nearly physically painful to see Angel hurting and not go to him, especially under circumstances like these, knowing how difficult it must have been for Angel to give up his son. "You could have told me."

"I thought it'd be safer for him, if no one knew."

"And now you're not so sure?"

"I don't know," Angel said finally, his hand twitching as if he wanted to reach out for Wesley's but was, perhaps, afraid of being rejected again. "Maybe not. Maybe it didn't matter. I just... I thought it was, you know, the right thing to do." He glanced up again, looking on the verge of tears. "I didn't know what else to do."

As Wesley reached out to touch Angel's shoulder, he was reminded of the first night they'd kissed. Angel had been upset then as well, although looking back, Wesley realized that he'd let himself be convinced that the emotion had come from somewhere other than where it had, which was, he knew now, because of Connor. "I wish you'd told me. I wish you hadn't had to decide on your own."

"Me too. Especially with how things turned out. I mean... not for him. But for you." Angel rubbed his forehead wearily.

"Sometimes," Wesley said slowly, "one is forced to make a difficult decision under less than ideal circumstances." He tried to remember the day they'd come to Wolfram and Hart to discuss the deal with Lilah -- how overwhelmed they'd been, how suspicious. How determined he'd been to save Lilah from the firm and herself, and how it had become clear that it was far too late for that.

"Yeah." Angel was watching him. It looked as if he were waiting for Wesley to say something profound, something that would solve the problem or at the very least define it more concretely.

Wesley didn't want to disappoint him, but the reality was that there was no right thing to say. "Sometimes the only option available to you is wrong. It doesn't matter that in the end things are all going to go to hell... it's all you can do."

Putting it into words didn't make Wesley feel better, so he stepped forward and kissed Angel instead.

It wasn't that the kiss or the concurrent embrace wiped away what had gone on before -- Wesley thought he'd had rather enough of that to last a lifetime -- but it did, somehow, provide comfort. They'd been in this together for years, in one form or another, and he needed to feel that connection, to know that it made no difference what happened between them because this was the place they'd always come back to. Whether they wanted to call that comrades in arms, or friendship, or love... none of that mattered.

"You never apologized either," Angel said, his voice slightly muffled against Wesley's shirt, which his face was pressed to.

"I know." Wesley didn't think he could.

"Maybe we should just, you know... forgive each other? Without all the words and everything?"

"I think," Wesley said, taking Angel's beloved face between his palms and meeting his gaze directly, "that's the best idea I've heard in a very long time."

It wasn't nearly that simple, of course, and he suspected that they both knew it.

But in the end, it was probably all they could do.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the the Angel Book of Days Winter Challenge. Prompt: Wesley ~ angst ~Angst ~ The Hyperion
> 
> Author's notes ~ Many thanks to Magpie and JustHuman for the encouragement and advice, and to Lonely Brit for the last minute beta.


End file.
